My Daming New Empire

In the past few days, he has been busy contacting the fleet everywhere, and then transporting the supplies needed by those ships to every place where they are needed.

This also gave him no time to go ashore and go looking for the natives with the army soldiers.

It was a fine day, and they needed to deliver repaired masts and dried planks to a large island four hundred miles to the south.A total of ten ships were stranded on that island, and it was impossible to set sail again until the ships were repaired.

The noon sun was a bit fierce, but the temperature was not high. Yang Dao was sitting under the awning on the deck, still studying the entire map of America.

He heard His Highness say that because it was drawn in a hurry, the scale of this map is not standardized, and it can only be used as a reference.

A [-]-mile mountain and a desert block the way to the east. It is not an easy task to go to the east.

They are the navy, and this time the task is to transport the army for landing operations, and then draw the charts of the sea and land bases.

Yang Dao has already received the task, and their twenty steam sailboats will be used as the main force to draw the sea chart of the east coast.

So his main energy now is on researching how to bypass the southern cape of Dongzhou, and then reach the northeast of Dongzhou.

The lookout on the mast suddenly called out: "Master Qian, I found cooking smoke."

Yang Dao didn't pay attention to it at first, because there were also Ming soldiers living on the island, so it was not surprising that they started a fire.

Looking from the deck, the mainland in the distance is just a shadow, and it is hard to see where there is cooking smoke.

Yang Dao pressed the map with a paperweight, and said, "Is there a ship repaired there?"

The lookout on the mast quickly climbed down from the mast like a monkey. "My lord, there is no ship of our army there, either it is a lost ship, or the natives here..."

Only then did Yang Dao become interested, took the telescope in his hand, hung it around his neck, and then climbed up the mast.

For many days in a row, most of the lost ships have been found, but no ships were found within sight.

Yang Dao quickly found an upward thick smoke. Although he could not see clearly because of the distance, he could find that the thick smoke did not rise from the sea, but from the mountains.

He immediately shouted: "Turn the rudder twenty degrees to the left and reduce the speed. Immediately send a speedboat to check the water depth and reef."

When the crew heard his shout, they immediately conveyed his order and got busy in an orderly manner.

The sailor on deck lowers, adjusts the sails, adjusts the power of the steam engine, while the navigator at the bow, one by one, transmits his orders to the crew below the stern at the helm.

The distance between the two places was almost ten miles. Although the speed of the boat slowed down, the boat was already close to the shore in two quarters of an hour.

Where the ship passed, no damaged ship was found, nor was there any broken plank.This also means that there are no storm-sinking ships or trapped soldiers here.

Yang Dao's heart became more and more agitated. Are they really natives? Are they native natives, or as His Highness said, are they the survivors of the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty or the Southern Song Dynasty?

Will they still speak Chinese language?Do you recognize their comrades from this ancestral land?

The five boats searched for more than half an hour before they found a harbor suitable for docking the boats. Before disembarking, Yang Dao was already excited.

Because he saw a few new boats, although these boats all looked like small sampans, but the style was indeed the boat style of the Central Plains.

This also means that the people here are closely related to them.

The two messenger ships have been tested in the port for a long time, because the water is too shallow, not to mention the first-level warships, even the second-level warships cannot dock.

Yang Dao couldn't wait any longer, so he directly used the semaphore to order all four messenger ships to be sent out, first sent three hundred musketeers to the shore, and then boarded the land here himself.

The full staff under his name is 1120 people, who were divided into five ships. There were nearly a thousand army soldiers on board, but because they were assisting in the repair of damaged ships, there were no outsiders on board.

He left about half of his men guarding the ship and dispatched [-] soldiers to land.

In this port, Yang Dao didn't dare to be careless. Although he saw traces of human life here, when he arrived in an unfamiliar area, the first thing he had to pay attention to was the growth of various germs and miasma.

They have already experienced it before going to sea. The environment that the local people are used to, the people of Ming Dynasty may get sick after going there, and the people of Ming Dynasty also brought disaster to many native people.

In Xizhou, because of their arrival, many tribesmen died inexplicably.

It wasn't until later that Daoist Zhonghezi found out that it was a virus carried by the Ming people. It was normal to the Ming people and had no effect, but it was highly poisonous to the aborigines.

At the port, the soldiers immediately set up several large pots, found dry firewood, and put the prepared medicinal materials into the pots to cook.

After cooking a few pots of medicinal soup, each soldier drank a bowl, and put peppermint oil and sachets made of mothballs under his nose. According to Yang Dao's arrangement, he was divided into five hundred-man teams and began to search in different directions.

Each centurion has ten swordsmen, responsible for opening the way, twenty shieldmen, responsible for cover and transportation, five liaison officers, and the remaining 65 musketeers are responsible for searching and fighting.

Yang Dao personally led a team of [-] people, and went directly to the direction where the cooking smoke was found.

Until now, it is still unknown whether it is an island or a continent. There are many mountains and few lands. Although the jungle is not dense, the trees are quite tall, most of which are pine trees.

For this kind of environment, Yang Dao is quite at ease.Although it is summer now, there may be snakes, insects, rats and ants, but because the place is northerly, it will not be as dangerous as the tropical rainforest.

When he was in Nanyang, he experienced the hot and humid virgin rainforest there.There are not only vine creatures that make it difficult to walk, but also more poisonous insects inside, which is a crisis at every step.

However, the search work was over before it started, because the local natives had discovered them long ago. As soon as they were about to set off, they found a dense crowd coming out of the woods with sticks in their hands.

The bodies of these natives were covered with clothes made of coarse hemp, and most of them had sharpened wooden sticks in their hands, but a few of them held iron weapons in their hands, and even a few of them held iron weapons in their hands. Holds a fine shortbow and a rough longbow.

The style of those short bows looks like that of the Mongolian Yuan people, but the long bows are only made of flexible branches and boiled animal skins, which are completely incomparable with the short bows.

Seeing the bow and arrow in the opponent's hand, the shieldman immediately squeezed to the front of the team, covering his fellow robes.

Yang Dao was startled by the sudden crowd at first, but he soon calmed down.

After observing for a while, the hemp clothes showed that the other party did not have advanced weaving technology, but only learned how to spin silk from pickled hemp.

There is no iron, which means that the opponent's iron and steel smelting technology is very backward, or there may be no iron mines in the area.

As for the ironware in their hands, it is very likely that they were left by their ancestors.

It's just that they don't know if they still understand Daming dialect.

Seeing that the opponent did not have a direct attack formation, he walked from the phalanx of soldiers to the front.Facing these natives whose skin color was similar to his own, he didn't have much intimacy, but he didn't feel much hostility either.

He clasped his hands.Then bowed and bowed.Although this posture is not necessarily the etiquette of the natives, whether it is in Nanzhou or Xizhou, this bowing posture often represents kindness.

Even if those natives don't understand these etiquettes, they can still know that this is not offensive.

Compared with Yang Dao, the soldiers were much more nervous. The muskets in their hands aimed at the archers one by one, for fear that the arrows in their hands would shoot out.

Yang Dao stood up straight, and said word by word in Daming official dialect: "Do you understand what I said?"

The crowd on the other side was a little confused, but there was also some commotion. A strong man who was obviously a leader and wore a string of animal bones around his neck came out of the crowd, and asked bluntly with a little Shanxi and Shaanxi accent: "Southern Song Dynasty ? Meng Yuan?"

Yang Dao was overjoyed, and immediately turned around and shouted: "Cao Fugui, come forward quickly."

Cao Fugui was one of the passers-by that they specially selected when they came. He was from Shanxi, and his accent was similar to that of the other party.

Cao Fugui, who was also delighted, got out of the crowd. He saluted the leader and said in Shanxi dialect: "We are from the Central Plains, today..."